#70....The Alexandria Quartet....Clea

"I began to see too that the real 'fiction' lay neither in Arnauti's pages nor Pursewarden's--nor even my own. It was life itself that was a fiction--we were all saying it on our different ways, each understanding it according to his nature and gift."

Clea, the fourth and final installment of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, attemps to wrap up the lives and destinies of the characters we've grown to know, love and/or detest during this series. Darley is asked to return to Alexandria to drop off Nessim and Melissa's kid with Nessim, and while doing so, hangs out with all of his wacky buddies to see what they've been up to since he took off to be a hermit on the island. Here's the breakdown of what's been going on in Alexandria:

Nessim and Justine: after their little illegal weapons caper, they're under house arrest.
Scobie, the dead cross-dressing secret agent: after his homemade liquor killed a whole bunch of people, and touching his bathtub made a bunch of women get pregnant, he's now revered as a quasi-saint by the locals.
Capodistria: actually not dead as was once thought. The guy everyone thought was him floating in the water at the duck hunt was someone else. He lives in Greece now.
Pursewarden: still dead. As far as I know.
Clea: she's apparently still painting, but she hooks up with Darley for much of the book and kicks him to the curb by the end of it. She also has an unfortunate boating accident that changes her career.
Mountolive: he's getting married to Pursewarden's blind sister Liza. He's still PO'd at Nessim.
Pombal: he hooked up with a married lady, who gets sick and dies.
Balthazar: he fell in love with a guy and went psycho. He's recovering now though.

And that's it. Clea reads like the high school reunion you'd never want to attend. After how much I liked the first three books, particularly Mountolive, this book fell very flat for me. I wanted, and to be honest, expected everyone to have more dramatic life changes, like Nessim going in front of a firing squad or Justine dying of the clap. Durrell had created a world where nothing was really outside the realm of possibility. So I have to say I was surprised that he went this direction. The story just kind of fizzed out for me like one of those sparklers on 4th of July.

In closing, I'm not sorry I read this series. There were some shocking revelations throughout, which kept you guessing what would happen next. By the time I finished Mountolive, I was used to drama and misunderstandings and 'a-ha moments'. Clea was different from the other three books in that it was the only one of the books that went into fast-forward. Nothing new and amazing was revealed in Clea like in the other three books, and maybe that was why I didn't like it as much?

Durrell showed us there are always different angles, different views, different takes on any one situation, and it was like peeling back the layers of an onion. That was the take-home message for me from this series.

Grade: C+

#81..."The Adventures of Augie March"

"Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can’t use he often can’t see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn’t correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn’t try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.”

Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March is a tour-de-force through the American life of its picaresque hero, Augie March. Augie is the middle child of a lower class family, living with his ambitious older brother Simon, mentally challenged brother George, and his mother, who was deserted by Augie’s father. The majority of the novel chronicles Augie’s journey to find himself and his purpose in life, which seems to be neverending, as Augie has absolutely zero attention span and can’t seem to commit to anyone or anything. At different points in the novel, he is an eagle-trainer, Merchant marine sailor, book-stealer, secretary to a millionaire, shoe salesman, law student, personal assistant, socialite, and strike organizer, and he lurches between love affairs in much the same way. He is a “born recruit”, due to his compassionate nature and gullibility, and because of this, finds himself unknowingly sucked into bad or difficult situations throughout the book. Augie manages to make it through these rough situations with the help of his friends and family, who disappear and resurface throughout the story constantly. He at last finds the stability and the love he has been seeking…but you get the feeling that the quest isn’t over yet, even at the end of the book.

I didn’t have a problem so much with the plot of the book, which definitely kept things interesting. You never knew what Augie would end up doing from page to page. I think my major hurdle with this book was Saul Bellow, not so much Augie. I would say it took me the first quarter of the book to get a handle on Bellow’s writing style, which consists of about three sentences per page (periods were definitely at a premium) and descriptive prose aplenty, which doesn’t always make for interesting reading. I tend to prefer plot over descriptions, so it was no wonder that Chapter 5 alone took me three days. The style of this book reminded me strongly of Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, which if you’ve read my review (here) was not a fave. Both characters were on quests of self-discovery, both waxed prolific about their philosophies of life, and both relied on friends to help them out of their various scrapes. I tend to prefer Augie over Under the Net’s Jake Donaghue, since Augie was very compassionate and went out of his way to help people. I’m still not sure what the he** Jake was supposed to be doing. :)

Anyway, 586 pages later, I know everything there is to know about Augie March, and I am reasonably sure my life has not changed substantially because of this book. A book like this naturally begs the question of why finish books you don't like, when there are so many others out there to enjoy. And my answer is this: When you're on a quest to complete any project out there, there are always going to be enjoyable parts, and then not-so-enjoyable parts. Reading through this list, 20 books in, I have found some real treasures, and some real junkers. Finding the treasures make getting through the junkers worthwhile. :)


This book fulfills the second book needed for the Battle of the Prizes, American Version (National Book Award winner in 1954) and is another book down for the Chunkster Challenge, at a hefty 586 pages.


Grade: C+

#85....Lord Jim

"It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live."

Pete Rose is arguably one of the most famous baseball players of our time. Here in Minnesota, we're all about Joe Mauer and his batting titles, but Rose in his heyday made Mauer look like a minor leaguer. According to Wikipedia, Rose is the MLB leader in "hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), and outs (10,328), with three World Series wins, three batting titles, one MVP Award, two Gold Gloves, the Rookie of the Year Award, and 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions (2B, LF, RF, 3B & 1B)".

However, none of that mattered in 1989. Rose had retired from baseball in 1986, but unfortunately, it came to light that during his years as a player and manager for the Cincinnati Reds, Rose had placed bets on his team as high as $10,000, always picking the Reds to win. It was felt that a player betting on baseball, even in favor of his own team,"jeopardized the integrity of the game". Rose was banned from baseball and put on the "permanently ineligible" list. He did not openly admit to the allegations until 2004. A career that should have been enshrined long ago in Cooperstown was permanently disgraced.

Joseph Conrad wasn't around to see what happened with Pete Rose, but the main character of his 1900 novel, Lord Jim, would have completely understood the pain associated with making a major mistake in your professional career that would taint the rest of your life. Jim is a regular guy who turns to a life on the sea as his trade. Jim is loving life as the chief officer of a boat called the Patna until one night when things go terribly, horribly wrong. The boat hits an underwater wreck and begins to fill with water. Jim prematurely panicks and jumps ship along with the other crew members, arriving back on land only to find the ship didn't actually sink and he is now under investigation for deserting his post. He is prohibited from ever being a ship captain again. Utterly humiliated, Jim hops from one menial job to the next, always skipping town whenever the Patna comes up in conversation. He is finally given an opportunity to start completely over in a small tribal community, where he is revered by the locals with the title of "Lord" Jim, until the day when trashy white sailors arrive on the island and threaten everything Jim has tried to escape. He is given a chance to redeem himself for his past and prove that he is not the coward he has been branded as.

I have found over a lifetime of reading that there are some books out there that you can coast through without having to read every word deliberately, yet still be able to follow the the story. And then there are books so wordy and dense that you feel like you have to crawl into a deep, dark, non-distracting hole for about a month in order to even find the story. Unfortunately, Lord Jim was one of the latter books for me. Conrad takes basic sentences like "the sky is blue" and turns them into a page-long paragraph, semi-colons, run-ons, and adjectives aplenty. I found myself re-reading sentences just to make sure I got every word, and then going, "Geez, was THAT all he was trying to say??" Someone should have let Conrad know that he could have bored a hole in himself any time and let the adverbs out.

The disappointment for me with Lord Jim was not that the story was bad. In fact, the last 1/3 and the ending were really good. The disappointment for me was how hard it was to slog through the first 2/3 of the book. It was like walking through two-foot deep snow, something we know all about up here in the Great White North.

The take home message? If you love what you do for a career, don't make the one major mistake that will screw it up forever. And if you decide to pick up Lord Jim, find your deep, dark, non-distracting hole in advance.

Grade: C

#95....Under the Net

"Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing."

Iris Murdoch’s 1954 novel, Under the Net, has been described as an example of the ‘picaresque’ novel, which Wikipedia terms as “an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road”. There is no better one-sentence summary of Under the Net and its roguish ‘anti-hero’, Jake Donaghue, out there. Jake, a thirty-something, self-obsessed, angst-ridden slacker who spends his time translating cheesy French novels and mooching off his friends, is kicked out of his house by his ex-girlfriend. Having no real source of income and lots of free time, Jake decides to hunt down another ex-girlfriend for a place to stay, and it is there that the long-winded and pointless escapades of an uninteresting, unemployed single guy begin. Fiances of old girlfriends, horse racing, dog-stealing, binge drinking and skinny dipping abound in spades, as Jake flounders around London trying to find himself, or a place to stay, whichever comes first.

One thing I noticed (and disliked) about this novel was the amount of time Murdoch spent in Jake’s head. The book was essentially written like one long stream-of-consciousness, like Jake’s brain with closed-captioning. In keeping with the Existentialist tradition, of which Murdoch was a proponent, she gets into the minutiae of Jake's life in order to more clearly define him....what he thinks about people, what he thinks they think about him, why he's going to do something, what might happen if he does it, what he thinks people will do when he does this....ad nauseum. It was ‘too much information’ for me, personally. I wasn’t sure if I didn’t like Jake’s character because I knew everything he was thinking, or if he just wasn’t all that interesting. Probably a bit of both. Hugo, the one character I would have liked to know more about, and someone Jake found so interesting that he wrote an entire book on his philosophy of life, would have made a much more fascinating main character, but alas, Murdoch chose to go with Everyman instead. Lucky us.

I’ve read several other reviews from people who loved this book and its irreverant style. I hate coming to the end of books feeling like I missed something, but I just didn’t find it with this one, and I blame myself.

Grade: C-

#98....The Postman Always Rings Twice

"I'm not what you think I am, Frank. I want to work and be something, that's all. But you can't do it without love. Do you know that, Frank? Anyway, a woman can't. Well, I've made one mistake. And I've got to be a hell cat, just once, to fix it. But I'm not really a hell cat, Frank."

James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, refused to be locked in to his reputation as a member of the “hard boiled school of crime fiction”, commenting "I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise". In fact, Cain had wanted to be an opera singer, but didn’t have the voice for it. As a journalist for the Baltimore Sun and the New York World in the 1920’s, Cain was probably exposed to sensationalist stories similar to the story he tells in Postman, which is reputed to have been based on a real life case. Drifter Frank Chambers is the wrong man in the wrong place, when he walks into a small café in the middle of nowhere and collides with Cora Papadakis, the wife of the café’s owner. Frank takes a job there and sparks fly between them, and Cora decides the only way out of her loveless marriage is for the two of them to kill her husband Nick. Nearly caught on the first attempt, the second attempt is successful, but brings more consequences than either Frank or Cora imagined.

Cain’s main characters were “often self-destructive, or used by stronger women.” Postman is no exception to this. Although Frank has a rough edge to his character, Cora is truly the ‘hell cat’ she describes herself as. Their affair is passionate, anything but tender, and unfortunately Nick’s death does not bring them the happiness they seek. Both toy with the idea of killing each other and Cora even gives Frank a chance to do this. Accountability for crimes is a dish best served hot.

As I’m sure millions of other readers have done, I looked throughout the book for any mention of a postman ringing twice, or even once, and came up with nothing. I found this quote to explain the title’s origin on Wikipedia:

"With the "postman" being God, or Fate, the "delivery" meant for Frank was his own death as just retribution for murdering Nick. Frank had missed the first "ring" when he initially got away with that killing. However, the postman rang again, and this time the ring was heard."

The book was rather short and the story pretty straightforward. Like with any murder mystery, it was very suspenseful and I do believe everyone got what was coming to them in the end. Not high in the profundity department but enjoyable nonetheless. Anyone from the John Grisham school will be happy.


GRADE: C+